Innovative Assessment and Feedback System for Structural Engineering Education

Abstract:

Commercial Online course management platforms are increasingly used in teaching and learning in many disciplines. However their use for setting assessment tasks in engineering education is often difficult and limited in achieving desired teaching and learning objectives. This is partly due to the nature of engineering exercise problems which often requires equation manipulation and multi-stage problem solving. This paper presents an innovative spreadsheet based tool which is designed to cater for this type of problem. The tool was developed for both formative and summative assessments and with a resource optimal capability to automate both marking and collecting timely feedback from students on their perceived learning. It aims to encourage active learning with activatable hints and to minimise plagiarism by generating individual assignment data for each student.